Author Topic: Amazing diversity of colors of my queens that came from cutouts and swarms.  (Read 1018 times)

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Offline badly stung

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I have four colonies started this spring that are doing well, two from cutouts and two from swarms, that I decided to re-queen. A couple of them are pretty aggressive, and the bees are extremely runny making it really hard to find the queens. I decided to make up a nuc from each hive with a couple of frames of brood each to introduce the new queens too, saving the old queens in their original hives for now. The plan is in case a queen gets rejected I won't wind up with a hive short a queen.

In the first hive I found the queen fairly quickly, and carefully selected a couple of frames of open brood including the adhering young bees for the nuc, without including her. I noticed she was a beautiful light golden color without any banding on her abdomen.

In the second hive I spent quite some time looking and with the bees being very runny and aggressive, I failed to find the queen, so in frustration I decided to move on to the next hive. I found her fairly quickly in the third hive, and she was also a beauty, but completely different looking. She was much darker, of a medium brown with black banding on her abdomen.

Moving on to the last hive, I again failed to find the queen after going through each frame carefully three times. Lots of bees, very runny on the combs, and with many kamikazie attempts on me each time I pulled a frame. Finally, I gave up to try again the next day, but had the same results on this fourth hive. I decided I had to do something different, so I moved the hive about twenty yards and replaced in it's place an unoccupied hive of drawn comb.

I again looked through the second hive, and although aggressive and runny, I finally found the queen. I was kind of surprised to see she was very, very dark colored, totally different than the other two queens I had found. Her abdomen was nearly all dark chocolate with slight banding showing. She was hard to get a good look at, as she kept diving under other fast moving bees, and crossing to the other side of the comb.

After twenty-four hours had passed since moving hive four, I went back in to look for the queen. The bees were still runny and aggressive, but the population was drastically reduced with most of the foragers having returned to the old location. On the next to the last frame I searched I found a beautiful, caramel colored queen. I was able to make up the nuc without including her, and since this is such a populated hive I added to the nuc a couple of extra shakes of young bees off of brood frames.  Afterwards, I recombined the hive on the old location.

I was so amazed at how different each queen looked. I wish I could have gotten some good photos of each one. Maybe I will try later. It makes me want to start a collection photographing each queen I can, just to be able to compare the differences.

Each of the nucs have purchased Carniolan caged queens introduced, and I'll leave them alone, except to fill the jar feeders, for a couple of weeks hoping they will be accepted. Hopefully, I can then find and remove at least the queens in the real aggressive two hives, and combine the nucs back to them.